Common Wasp

The common wasp (Vespula vulgaris) is a social wasp of Europe and Asia that builds papery nests and stings when threatened. It is a useful predator of insects early in the season and an annoying visitor to picnics in late summer.

🧬 Field Guide Specimen: Open Common Wasp in the CRV Science Field Guide to log the specimen, see its place among the Ecdysozoa lineages in the Cladogram Explorer, and test your recall in the Red List conservation game.

A single queen wakes in spring, builds a small paper nest from chewed wood fiber and raises the first workers. The colony may grow to thousands of wasps by late summer and then dies off in autumn, except for new queens that mate and hibernate.

Adults feed on sugary liquids, while the workers hunt flies and caterpillars to feed the larvae. In late summer, when the larvae stop producing sweet secretions for the adults, workers seek sugar in other places such as drinks and fruit.

In New Zealand, introduced common wasps reach some of the highest densities recorded anywhere in beech forests, where they feed on honeydew and compete with native birds and insects. See Western Honeybee.

• Western Honeybee — a social relative
• Marmalade Hoverfly — a harmless mimic